No.
You keep forgetting the aerogram has value as 40c or whatever postage was printed on it. If you need to send it to say someone in England your two choices are
or
Option 2 is the only sensible option.
Yes, precisely for the reason that the postage was a prepaid fixed amount. No fairsies paying only X amount for the aerogram and then trying to smuggle out additional material requiring an extra Y amount of postage inside it.
That’s assuming that the pre-paid postage on an aerogram is still good for forty cents, and that the USPS allows you to use it and top it up with other stamps. Chronos has already speculated on this, but do we know for sure this is the case?
Yes, the only demonetized US Stamps are those issued pre-Civil War and Special Delivery Stamps. For instance, you can use stamps from 1893 worth anywhere from $50-$1000’s but as far as the USPS is concerned, they’re worth the postage indicated. But in those circumstances it would be foolish to do so.
Aerograms, AFAIK, probably have an intrinsic collector value higher than their face value but nothing extreme, and you’d be hard pressed to find a dealer willing to give you enough to make it worth while. So for all intents and purposes, it would be reasonable to append the missing postage and use them. Note that they are no longer considered aerograms and you can stick a letter inside if you use one now.
Actually, the material was typically OK (but hard to specify if you weren’t visiting). The other objection was that you could easily wind up with a suit that looked like the suits worn by men in movies made in Hong Kong (Chinese language or martial arts).
It’s not a huge difference – people used to wear all kinds of subtly different suits anyway – but it was recognizable.
This thread is such a trip. I had no idea such a thing as “aerograms” even existed. We used to correspond with the Old World quite often, and I lived in Europe in the mid-90s to early 00s, and I had never heard of such a thing! I do remember writing “Par Avion/Airmail” on my letters, or using a special Air Mail envelope (or using a Par Avion stamp), but no recollection whatsoever of aerograms. I wonder how I missed these. Maybe these were slightly behind my time.
I do recall how much a PITA it was to call back home, though. Expensive as hell, and sometimes you had to order your international call in advance (depending on what part of the world you were in.) That said, I do remember some sort of hack when I was in the UK that allowed me to call back home either for free or for local rates. I can’t remember for the life of me what the trick was, but it was from a payphone, and didn’t require any special phreaking equipment or anything like that.
Growing up in Canada I’d never heard of Aerograms until I travelled through Asia for a year in the mid-1980’s. I embraced them completely.
Aerograms had huge advantages - Since they were an envelope, writing paper, stamp and airmail sticker all in one, they saved you shopping and lining up multiple time in stores to buy the separate pieces. I didn’t worry about toting around all the separate items, inevitably losing a stamp and having to buy another one. Also, the post office in many places wouldn’t just sell you an “airmail stamp”. They’d only apply postage to the final weighed item.
They also saved you a later trip to the post office and the time in the queue. As others noted, since you couldn’t include anything in the aerogram, you could drop it in any post box anywhere in that country. Regular" airmail letter needed to be weighed then postage added, which meant finding a post office, getting there & back (which could literally take a day in somewhere like Rangoon) plus queuing up for an hour.
As others noted, in the mid-80s, you could phone or send telegrams but they were also expensive and very inconvenient. I found outside N. America or western Europe home phones were virtually unheard of and international calls impossible anywhere but a main post office or the main airport.
Unlike mhendo - In Asia you couldn’t put money into a phone yourself. The airports & post offices had a special International Telecommunication Room where you could call or send telegrams. You queued up and you wrote the phone number on a form and gave it to a guy behind the wicket. He told you how much per minute to the country you were calling. You prepaid and then sat down waiting (sometimes for an hour) for your name to be be called. “GMan Booth 17” you ran to get the ringing phone so you could be there when your parents answered (otherwise, they’d answer, get no response, think the line was dead, and hang up = too bad, you lost your money.) At the end of x minutes the call just cut off.